Post by Redneck Jack on Jan 9, 2009 11:51:08 GMT -5
HEAR YE HEAR YE
Hot off the presses.
I just stole this from the POTBS web site..
Enjoy and rejoice all of us that struggle building shite fer ships n other fancy stuffs.
****************************************
Economic Stimulus Package Wax Seal Decoration
01/07/2009 | Developer Log | Lum | Discuss
Over the last several months, the Design team has been gathering data about the economy from a wide variety of sources. We looked at how goods were produced, how often they were made, how they were exchanged, where they were distributed, and how those goods were consumed. We looked at topics in the forums and survey results and tried to match them up with hard data.
The Economy was designed with one main goal in mind: large scale construction of ships. It is successful at this goal but only in a certain context. Large Societies can effectively plan out huge production chains with efficient output and virtually guarantee they have the goods they need at any time. There are some byproducts to this: a well executed production chain has very little left over to sell to outside customers. It also limits the flexibility of individual players in the chain, as they must perform specific tasks at regular intervals, in order to maintain the flow of ships and not waste labor.
However, a healthy Economy is not just about end goods. Merriam-Webster defines an economy as “a social system of production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of goods and services”.
What we found is that we had lots of production (making ships!) and lots of consumption (sinking ships!), but very little exchange and almost no distribution. The Economy works extremely well, provided you can sustain the infrastructure necessary to produce goods in large quantities. But if you can’t make it to the top of the food chain, you’re stuck with a small market and no help from the auction house.
At the very core, the problem with the Economy is the availability of goods.
Money is not really a problem – most players are not treating the Economy as a way to make money. Players are making money from missions and then trying to use that money to create goods. Investment is not a problem – economic players are building and using structures to make goods. The infrastructure for economic activity is present. What players are finding is that they can make item A and item B, but they cannot turn A and B into desired good C via the auction house.
We discussed a few approaches to this problem. There were other potential solutions we considered, including some that made the Economy an optional secondary game system. Even though many solutions had positive aspects to them, what we felt was really necessary was to streamline production and make goods more available to everyone.
Approach 1:
Assume that people want to use the auction house to turn the goods they’re making into goods they want. We make it easier for them to do so by streamlining the process of listing items for sale in the auction house and increasing the duration items can be kept in the auction house for sale. We take this approach if we think the Economy can self-correct.
Approach 2:
Assume that people have no interest in manufacturing outside their immediate needs and the difficulty of fulfilling their own needs is the central problem they’re facing. Streamline manufacturing, remove many of the steps necessary to create items and lower the labor costs for all recipes so that a casual economic player can create his own outfitting and ships with little involvement from the other players.
Approach 1 is a slower, more long term solution and portions of it are still important. Approach 2 is a short to medium term solution, aimed at getting more people involved immediately.
Separating the wheat from the chaff
Our plan is focused in two main sections: Giving out more labor, to enable players to produce more goods, and streamlining recipes, to enable players to be more flexible.
The biggest bottleneck in the Economy currently is labor. Players have the infrastructure, they have the money, but they’re handicapped by the physical time it takes to create goods. The easy solution here is MORE LABOR. As such, we’ve reduced the global labor multiplier from 1 to 0.5. This effectively halves the labor needed by all recipes. A recipe that took 4 hours will now take only 2. This should ease the strain of production on small groups of players and solo players.
The second task is to look at every structure, recipe, and end good to see where we can make improvements, cut costs and save time in the production chain. There are lots of changes here, but too many for a single Devlog. I’ll outline the important ones here and there will be a full list available on another page.
Structures
We have lots of structures that are very similar to one another, but perform slightly different tasks. Some examples are Logging Camps, Mines and Plantations. In an ideal world, having one Mine structure instead of 6 would be great. However, it wouldn’t actually mean using fewer structure lots, because players would still have to build a Mine on a specific resource, whether it’s Copper, Zinc or Iron.
We also have structures like the Carpenter and Lumber Mill, which have different recipes but essentially perform the same task: refining raw wood logs into buildable materials for ships. These structures and their recipes are being combined into one, freeing up structure lots and allowing each Lumber Mill to produce more goods and be more versatile.
Another pair of structures that we’re combining: The Weaponsmith and the Forge. Again, these two structures share a common purpose: refining raw ore into specific materials for ships. Now the Forge contains all the recipes of the Weaponsmith.
Provisions
Ship Provisioning is a long and complicated production chain and deciding where to make changes was difficult. We’ve altered a number of steps along the way and it should be a smaller, more manageable chain.
* We removed Refined Flour; Hardtack now requires Wheat as an ingredient.
* Provisions no longer require Refined Flour.
* As a result of removing Refined Flour, we’ve also removed the Grain Mill, as it’s no longer required.
* We removed Maize; Cheesemaking and Cattle Breeding no longer require Maize. This helped to shorten the paths to both Cured Meat and Cheese.
* As part of this change, we adjusted the cost of Cheesemaking to compensate for not having Maize.
* We’ve also adjusted the cost of Livestock and Game Animals, so that the two paths to Meat and Leather are more in line with one another.
* The Rum Distillery is now part of the Sugar Refinery, so the Refinery is now your one stop shop for Sugar and Rum.
Ship Recipes
Creating a complete ship from logs and ore is a very involved production chain and the most important piece of the Economy. It’s also an excellent place to make changes and save time. One pattern we found when researching economic activity was that ship production was almost entirely for large ships or bigger. While most ships use similar goods, larger ships use large variants of those goods. The result of this is that if there are any shipwright materials on the Auction House, they’re rarely the kind that players producing smaller ships need. To help with this, we’re combining several shipwright materials into a single size and some are being removed entirely.
The two biggest pieces of a ship are the Hull, and the Rig. These both have lots of changes.
For Hulls, we combined a number of materials:
* Large/Small Frame Timber, Large/Small Filling Frame, Large/Small Beam, Large/Small Transom, have all been rolled into a single item: Frame Timber. Frame Timber forms the basis of the structure of all ships, and it comes in both Oak and Lignum Vitae varieties.
* Strakes have been combined with Planks, so only Planks will be required in recipes. Planks come in both Oak and Teak varieties.
* The many sizes of Keels have been folded into one item: Keel Sections. Some ships may take more than one Keel Section in order to form a Keel of appropriate size.
Previously, the recipe for a Colossal Hull looked like this:
* Beam, Large
* Beam, Small
* Brass Ship Fittings
* Iron Ship Fittings
* Filling Frame, Large
* Filing Frame, Small
* Frame Timber, Small
* Frame Timber, Large
* Frame Timber, Lignum Vitae
* Keel, Large
* Nails
* Planks, Oak
* Planks, Teak
* Ship Stem
* Strakes, Oak
* Strakes, Teak
* Transom, Large
* Transom, Small
Now it looks like this:
* Ship Fitting, Brass
* Ship Fittings, Iron
* Frame Timber, Oak
* Frame Timber, Lignum Vitae
* Keel
* Ship Stem
* Nails
* Planks, Oak
* Planks, Teak
For Rigs, we were able to streamline the process just as much:
* Large/Medium/Small Mast Section and Large/Medium/Small Spar now become Mast Sections. Mast Sections are used for both large vertical poles as well as the lateral stabilizers in a mast.
* Large/Medium/Small Sails are now simply Sailcloth. A ship may take many sections of sailcloth to be properly outfitted.
* Mast Hoops have been removed but in their place we use Iron Ship Fittings, because they’re functionally the same thing.
The Recipe for a Huge Square Rig used to look like this:
* Blocks, Lignum Vitae
* Mast Hoops
* Mast Section, Small
* Mast Section, Medium
* Mast Section, Large
* Rigging
* Sail, Small
* Sail, Medium
* Sail, Large
* Spar, Small
* Spar, Medium
* Spar, Large
Now it looks like this:
* Blocks, Lignum Vitae
* Ship Fittings, Iron
* Mast Sections
* Rigging
* Sailcloth
Finally, are a few miscellaneous areas we’ve streamlined to make things easier:
* We’ve removed Lead Ingots, as they were rarely used and mostly unnecessary. Any recipes that used Lead will now use Iron.
* We’ve removed Copper Ingots, because they were a large labor sink in the Brass production line and were not used for much else. All recipes using Copper Ingots now use Copper Ore, which should shorten Brass production by a large amount.
* We’ve removed Ballast and Ship Deeds now require Granite in equal amounts.
* Finally, there will now only be one size of Anchor to replace the Small/Medium/Large sizes.
All of these changes should make production a bit simpler and, combined with the increased labor multiplier, should help to get more goods flowing. Since every ship now uses the same goods, it should be easier to find materials and easier to build your own.
When we converted recipes from old materials to new materials, there were often fractional amounts left over. We’ve rounded all of these down, so all ships are now marginally cheaper.
Insurance
The introduction of Insurance changed the Economy in a number of ways, both good and bad. The most important part of Insurance is that it got players into more ships, more often. In our data we saw both production (making ships!) and consumption (sinking ships!) go up, which is good. The other side of Insurance is that a large portion of the currency used to make goods never leaves the Economy, resulting in inflation.
In the interest of reigning in Insurance a bit, as well as adjusting the balance of power in ships, players will no longer be awarded any insurance for Lineship Structure Bundles. That means that any ship which requires a Lineship Structure Bundle will have its insurance value calculated for all its required materials except the LSB.
What now?
I know that after reading this, there are two questions that you’ll ask: “What am I supposed to do with the stock I have of these old goods?”, and “What happens to my existing structures?”
Some of the goods players currently have will still be useful. For the items that aren’t, your friendly neighborhood Auctioneer has opened up an Exchange shop. The Old Goods Exchange Shop will allow you to trade any obsolete goods for their base raw materials. To avoid confusion, all materials that are obsolete will say so in their descriptions.
For structures, Players may have to demolish and rebuild some structures to gain all the correct recipes, if they only had one of the two old structures. If players had both, they can demolish the obsolete structure with no negative effects.
Example:
* Players with existing Carpenter structures will be able to use any recipe from the Lumber Mill but will have to demolish and build a Lumber Mill to get some recipes provided by default from the Lumber Mill.
* Players with existing Lumber Mill structures will be able to use any recipe from the Carpenter, but will have to demolish and build a new Lumber Mill to get some recipes provided by default from the Carpenter.
* Players with both existing Carpenter and Lumber Mill structures can demolish the Carpenter, because they already have all the recipes.
We’re going to continue to monitor the economy once these changes go live. We do want to see the Economy thrive again, and we will continue to make changes to keep the market going strong.
Hot off the presses.
I just stole this from the POTBS web site..
Enjoy and rejoice all of us that struggle building shite fer ships n other fancy stuffs.
****************************************
Economic Stimulus Package Wax Seal Decoration
01/07/2009 | Developer Log | Lum | Discuss
Over the last several months, the Design team has been gathering data about the economy from a wide variety of sources. We looked at how goods were produced, how often they were made, how they were exchanged, where they were distributed, and how those goods were consumed. We looked at topics in the forums and survey results and tried to match them up with hard data.
The Economy was designed with one main goal in mind: large scale construction of ships. It is successful at this goal but only in a certain context. Large Societies can effectively plan out huge production chains with efficient output and virtually guarantee they have the goods they need at any time. There are some byproducts to this: a well executed production chain has very little left over to sell to outside customers. It also limits the flexibility of individual players in the chain, as they must perform specific tasks at regular intervals, in order to maintain the flow of ships and not waste labor.
However, a healthy Economy is not just about end goods. Merriam-Webster defines an economy as “a social system of production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of goods and services”.
What we found is that we had lots of production (making ships!) and lots of consumption (sinking ships!), but very little exchange and almost no distribution. The Economy works extremely well, provided you can sustain the infrastructure necessary to produce goods in large quantities. But if you can’t make it to the top of the food chain, you’re stuck with a small market and no help from the auction house.
At the very core, the problem with the Economy is the availability of goods.
Money is not really a problem – most players are not treating the Economy as a way to make money. Players are making money from missions and then trying to use that money to create goods. Investment is not a problem – economic players are building and using structures to make goods. The infrastructure for economic activity is present. What players are finding is that they can make item A and item B, but they cannot turn A and B into desired good C via the auction house.
We discussed a few approaches to this problem. There were other potential solutions we considered, including some that made the Economy an optional secondary game system. Even though many solutions had positive aspects to them, what we felt was really necessary was to streamline production and make goods more available to everyone.
Approach 1:
Assume that people want to use the auction house to turn the goods they’re making into goods they want. We make it easier for them to do so by streamlining the process of listing items for sale in the auction house and increasing the duration items can be kept in the auction house for sale. We take this approach if we think the Economy can self-correct.
Approach 2:
Assume that people have no interest in manufacturing outside their immediate needs and the difficulty of fulfilling their own needs is the central problem they’re facing. Streamline manufacturing, remove many of the steps necessary to create items and lower the labor costs for all recipes so that a casual economic player can create his own outfitting and ships with little involvement from the other players.
Approach 1 is a slower, more long term solution and portions of it are still important. Approach 2 is a short to medium term solution, aimed at getting more people involved immediately.
Separating the wheat from the chaff
Our plan is focused in two main sections: Giving out more labor, to enable players to produce more goods, and streamlining recipes, to enable players to be more flexible.
The biggest bottleneck in the Economy currently is labor. Players have the infrastructure, they have the money, but they’re handicapped by the physical time it takes to create goods. The easy solution here is MORE LABOR. As such, we’ve reduced the global labor multiplier from 1 to 0.5. This effectively halves the labor needed by all recipes. A recipe that took 4 hours will now take only 2. This should ease the strain of production on small groups of players and solo players.
The second task is to look at every structure, recipe, and end good to see where we can make improvements, cut costs and save time in the production chain. There are lots of changes here, but too many for a single Devlog. I’ll outline the important ones here and there will be a full list available on another page.
Structures
We have lots of structures that are very similar to one another, but perform slightly different tasks. Some examples are Logging Camps, Mines and Plantations. In an ideal world, having one Mine structure instead of 6 would be great. However, it wouldn’t actually mean using fewer structure lots, because players would still have to build a Mine on a specific resource, whether it’s Copper, Zinc or Iron.
We also have structures like the Carpenter and Lumber Mill, which have different recipes but essentially perform the same task: refining raw wood logs into buildable materials for ships. These structures and their recipes are being combined into one, freeing up structure lots and allowing each Lumber Mill to produce more goods and be more versatile.
Another pair of structures that we’re combining: The Weaponsmith and the Forge. Again, these two structures share a common purpose: refining raw ore into specific materials for ships. Now the Forge contains all the recipes of the Weaponsmith.
Provisions
Ship Provisioning is a long and complicated production chain and deciding where to make changes was difficult. We’ve altered a number of steps along the way and it should be a smaller, more manageable chain.
* We removed Refined Flour; Hardtack now requires Wheat as an ingredient.
* Provisions no longer require Refined Flour.
* As a result of removing Refined Flour, we’ve also removed the Grain Mill, as it’s no longer required.
* We removed Maize; Cheesemaking and Cattle Breeding no longer require Maize. This helped to shorten the paths to both Cured Meat and Cheese.
* As part of this change, we adjusted the cost of Cheesemaking to compensate for not having Maize.
* We’ve also adjusted the cost of Livestock and Game Animals, so that the two paths to Meat and Leather are more in line with one another.
* The Rum Distillery is now part of the Sugar Refinery, so the Refinery is now your one stop shop for Sugar and Rum.
Ship Recipes
Creating a complete ship from logs and ore is a very involved production chain and the most important piece of the Economy. It’s also an excellent place to make changes and save time. One pattern we found when researching economic activity was that ship production was almost entirely for large ships or bigger. While most ships use similar goods, larger ships use large variants of those goods. The result of this is that if there are any shipwright materials on the Auction House, they’re rarely the kind that players producing smaller ships need. To help with this, we’re combining several shipwright materials into a single size and some are being removed entirely.
The two biggest pieces of a ship are the Hull, and the Rig. These both have lots of changes.
For Hulls, we combined a number of materials:
* Large/Small Frame Timber, Large/Small Filling Frame, Large/Small Beam, Large/Small Transom, have all been rolled into a single item: Frame Timber. Frame Timber forms the basis of the structure of all ships, and it comes in both Oak and Lignum Vitae varieties.
* Strakes have been combined with Planks, so only Planks will be required in recipes. Planks come in both Oak and Teak varieties.
* The many sizes of Keels have been folded into one item: Keel Sections. Some ships may take more than one Keel Section in order to form a Keel of appropriate size.
Previously, the recipe for a Colossal Hull looked like this:
* Beam, Large
* Beam, Small
* Brass Ship Fittings
* Iron Ship Fittings
* Filling Frame, Large
* Filing Frame, Small
* Frame Timber, Small
* Frame Timber, Large
* Frame Timber, Lignum Vitae
* Keel, Large
* Nails
* Planks, Oak
* Planks, Teak
* Ship Stem
* Strakes, Oak
* Strakes, Teak
* Transom, Large
* Transom, Small
Now it looks like this:
* Ship Fitting, Brass
* Ship Fittings, Iron
* Frame Timber, Oak
* Frame Timber, Lignum Vitae
* Keel
* Ship Stem
* Nails
* Planks, Oak
* Planks, Teak
For Rigs, we were able to streamline the process just as much:
* Large/Medium/Small Mast Section and Large/Medium/Small Spar now become Mast Sections. Mast Sections are used for both large vertical poles as well as the lateral stabilizers in a mast.
* Large/Medium/Small Sails are now simply Sailcloth. A ship may take many sections of sailcloth to be properly outfitted.
* Mast Hoops have been removed but in their place we use Iron Ship Fittings, because they’re functionally the same thing.
The Recipe for a Huge Square Rig used to look like this:
* Blocks, Lignum Vitae
* Mast Hoops
* Mast Section, Small
* Mast Section, Medium
* Mast Section, Large
* Rigging
* Sail, Small
* Sail, Medium
* Sail, Large
* Spar, Small
* Spar, Medium
* Spar, Large
Now it looks like this:
* Blocks, Lignum Vitae
* Ship Fittings, Iron
* Mast Sections
* Rigging
* Sailcloth
Finally, are a few miscellaneous areas we’ve streamlined to make things easier:
* We’ve removed Lead Ingots, as they were rarely used and mostly unnecessary. Any recipes that used Lead will now use Iron.
* We’ve removed Copper Ingots, because they were a large labor sink in the Brass production line and were not used for much else. All recipes using Copper Ingots now use Copper Ore, which should shorten Brass production by a large amount.
* We’ve removed Ballast and Ship Deeds now require Granite in equal amounts.
* Finally, there will now only be one size of Anchor to replace the Small/Medium/Large sizes.
All of these changes should make production a bit simpler and, combined with the increased labor multiplier, should help to get more goods flowing. Since every ship now uses the same goods, it should be easier to find materials and easier to build your own.
When we converted recipes from old materials to new materials, there were often fractional amounts left over. We’ve rounded all of these down, so all ships are now marginally cheaper.
Insurance
The introduction of Insurance changed the Economy in a number of ways, both good and bad. The most important part of Insurance is that it got players into more ships, more often. In our data we saw both production (making ships!) and consumption (sinking ships!) go up, which is good. The other side of Insurance is that a large portion of the currency used to make goods never leaves the Economy, resulting in inflation.
In the interest of reigning in Insurance a bit, as well as adjusting the balance of power in ships, players will no longer be awarded any insurance for Lineship Structure Bundles. That means that any ship which requires a Lineship Structure Bundle will have its insurance value calculated for all its required materials except the LSB.
What now?
I know that after reading this, there are two questions that you’ll ask: “What am I supposed to do with the stock I have of these old goods?”, and “What happens to my existing structures?”
Some of the goods players currently have will still be useful. For the items that aren’t, your friendly neighborhood Auctioneer has opened up an Exchange shop. The Old Goods Exchange Shop will allow you to trade any obsolete goods for their base raw materials. To avoid confusion, all materials that are obsolete will say so in their descriptions.
For structures, Players may have to demolish and rebuild some structures to gain all the correct recipes, if they only had one of the two old structures. If players had both, they can demolish the obsolete structure with no negative effects.
Example:
* Players with existing Carpenter structures will be able to use any recipe from the Lumber Mill but will have to demolish and build a Lumber Mill to get some recipes provided by default from the Lumber Mill.
* Players with existing Lumber Mill structures will be able to use any recipe from the Carpenter, but will have to demolish and build a new Lumber Mill to get some recipes provided by default from the Carpenter.
* Players with both existing Carpenter and Lumber Mill structures can demolish the Carpenter, because they already have all the recipes.
We’re going to continue to monitor the economy once these changes go live. We do want to see the Economy thrive again, and we will continue to make changes to keep the market going strong.
